By Katerina Zachovalova Oct 1, 2009, 12:16 GMT
Prague - An historic train left Prague Thursday on an 11- hour ride to a city in what was once known as West Germany, marking a journey to freedom made by thousands of East German refugees 20 years ago.
Pushed by an engine adorned with a Communist-era five-pointed red star, the Freedom Train, as it is known, is set to pull into a railway station in the Bavarian city of Hof, just as it did two decades before.
'It was a break in my life,' said Rene Heymann, who is among five former East German refugees taking part in the memorial ride. 'I cut off my former life. It was a new beginning.'
He was 12 when he boarded the train to freedom on October 1, 1989, after spending two days at the then West German embassy in Prague, then the capital of Communist Czechoslovakia.
In September 1989, thousands of East German escapees crammed into the embassy's sprawling garden in hopes of escaping to the West.
After weeks of tough negotiations, West Germany's then foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher flew to Prague to bring good news to some 4,000 escapees packed in the embassy's grounds: They were to be allowed to board trains to the democratic West.
But under the deal between the two German republics, the trains had to pass through East Germany, a source of great apprehension among the exiles.
Genscher said he rushed to personally convey the news in Prague, hoping it would alleviate such fears.
'It was clear to me that if I tell them your trains must go through the East they will be afraid,' he recalled at a press conference held at the embassy on Wednesday. 'I could tell them: Nothing will happen to you.'
The route frightened Markus Rindt, now 41, a musician who had escaped his homeland with his girlfriend because she was not allowed to study in the Communist German Democratic Republic.
'We were excited and worried at the same time,' he recalled shortly before hopping the Freedom Train for the anniversary trip.
While some of the refugees settled in Germany's west, others - including Heymann and Rindt - found their way back east after the country's 1990 reunification.
Rindt co-founded the Dresden Sinfoniker, a symphonic orchestra that focuses on contemporary music, while Heymann works in Dresden as a process engineer.
The handful of refugees was joined Thursday by 40 Prague high school students and a band of artists from the former Eastern bloc who turned the train cars into an impromptu gallery, trip organizer Mirko Sennewald said.
As dignitaries posed for cameras, the passengers boarded the Communist-era carriages, which can be still seen riding in the Czech countryside.
The compartment walls remain paneled with brown plastic laminate and fitted with uncomfortable faux-leather seats - a mixture of materials that gives off a distinct odor.
'That smell. How is it possible after 20 years?' said Torsten Preuss, 46, a writer and publisher, who had emigrated to West Germany in the mid-1980s but later also returned to live in Dresden in the former East.
'It is unbelievable. After 20 years I catch this train. It smells like Communism,' he said.
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